Evelyn is located in Paddington which is an inner-city suburb of Brisbane, fairly famous for
character houses. It was one of those projects that you knew straight away had so much
potential. When we first met Ian and Laura, they came to us with a vision for this house.
For them it was about their family, for them it was about how
they wanted to live. Myself and my business partner, having children the same age,
we understood straight away what they were trying to achieve out of this house.
It was a little cottage, we like to think that 1911 cottage that was there was always Evelyn;
she was just wrapped up, bordered off and we just had to come in and throw the drapes aside,
peel the edges back, get her up out of the ground and give her a new life...
and the front door almost doesn't exist, it's more of a gate than it is anything else
and as you peel inside you arrive underneath an olive tree, on a lawn,
in an outdoor room. There's no celebration about a big grand entrance or a big void;
the big void is the art, it's the lungs and the heart of the entire house,
so we deliberately downplay every other aspect around it. It nestles in and it understands what
it is to live in a Queenslander. Nine days out of ten, you can live with the entire house open.
Every circulation path, every room, every moment and every aspect of this house
responds back to the lawn, the pool and the garden that it's nestled within
and that very act of going up two steps through an archway is what separates the private domains,
which is the kids bedrooms, the bathrooms and the master bedroom. Those rooms become less about the
courtyard and more about this private sanctuary in the back. You simply have to pull one door
away and you can physically touch the trees, the plants, see the butterflies flying past.
In a nutshell that's what this house tries to achieve. We live busy hectic lives,
we all work in intense jobs, you travel through the CBD and being so close
to all that is hectic about inner-city living. When you come through the front
door and you shut it behind you, this house aspires to being one of retreat, tranquility.
Then we brought in some more obvious ways to explore that sense of green vista. In the
bathrooms for instance, where we've wrapped the entire bathrooms in that beautiful green terrazzo,
so you really do feel like you're sinking down into the bath, immersing yourself in the garden.
The original workers cottage part of the house which is
directly behind me was a testament to the era of building at the time, so in the interiors,
we wanted to bring in that handcrafted nature of joinery work and timber work. That one
continuous detail used consistently throughout the house gives it rhythm.
Throughout the house, the lighting has been very deliberately chosen, particularly the lack of any
lighting on the ceiling. The ceiling itself has a beautiful curved arch and we didn't want to
destroy that, so we've fixed all our lighting to the side, we've made the most of both wall
lighting and up and down lights. At night time, those wall lights cast a beautiful soft glow
which is really nice contrast to the dappled light that runs across the floor during the day.
One of the most important aspects was a desire to live all on one level.
That's an interesting aspect in any inner-city Brisbane brief when you have a one in eight
slope. One of the first things we did was lift the cottage back up. From the outside you'll
see a series of new gables, each one of those matching the existing gable roof of the cottage.
Etched into that concrete arch are the old VJ boards, remnants of a bygone era. The ceilings
mirror and mimic the cladding and the timber because we wanted all of the new to seamlessly
transition into the old and vice versa. It's very much part of the storyline of that house.
The arch is a really strong motif that we've used to delineate moving from one space
to the next. As you come up the stairs, you're actually greeted by an arch in planned form,
which is wrapped around the olive tree in the courtyard and then as you step inside the house,
we've used the arch again to break those zones throughout the house. I wanted to really continue
that sense of serenity through limited material palette but used and crafted with detail.
This isn't a house of features, it's not a house of dominant colour, tones or
materiality. It's very much a subtle reduced palette. It brings that backyard into the centre.
It's paramount. Without that yard being at the middle, the house doesn't function...
and our architecture responds to that, creating rooms that are both indoor and outdoor.
We have shutters without glass in them so that you open the shutters and they
catch the breezes as they move down past the side of the house.
We have windows that face predominantly south in the bedrooms and so in summer, they're beautifully
cool spaces but also have big fins on the north in winter to allow that winter sunlight directly in.
You see that green garden from every aspect, so from the outdoor room, you spill out onto
the grass. From the kitchen you spill out onto the grass. From the lounge and the dining room again,
open those doors and the kids can be playing right outside.
We are extremely fortunate as architects to be given
the trust to design houses for people, spaces where families come together,
so to spend time with Ian and Laura and have a much longer lasting friendship at the end
of this project is rare, but it's the one thing that makes doing what we do so special.
It's calm and it's reserved, intelligent and functional but equally it says on a weekend,
"let's throw the doors open, there's a party at my house". That's Ian and Laura.
Every time I walk back in, I smile. This house is so very much them.